Thoughts on classical music in London, on the web and beyond. By Gavin Dixon.

Thursday, 30 May 2013

Steven Osborne Vingt regards Queen Elizabeth Hall 29 May 13

Messiaen:Vingt
regards sur l'enfant-Jésus

Steven
Osborne (piano)

Steven
Osborne seemed destined to battle the odds with his performance of Vingt Regards this evening. The steely,
clear tones of a Steinway D, in the deadening acoustic of the Queen Elizabeth
Hall, is hardly the ideal setting for Messiaen’s perfumed devotions. As it turned
out, this bright and focussed piano sound proved ideal for Osborne’s reading. Details
of texture and harmony are at the heart of his interpretation, and by giving
clarity to every chord and every phrase, he was able to demonstrate that there
is far more to this music than Catholic mysticism, and that its emotional
impact is as much a result of the innovative and finely-wrought piano textures
as it is of the theological ideas that inspired it.

In
the absence of a resonant acoustic, silences became all the more intense.
Audience expectation ran high (no doubt because Osborne’s recording of this
work is considered among the finest available) and when he came onto the stage
and sat at the keyboard, it seemed that nobody breathed until he played his
first chord. And the opening passages set the tone for the performance ahead:
quiet and precisely voiced, crystalline and inscrutable. Under other hands, this
opening movement can tend towards Impressionism, but Osborne stands further
back from the emotion within the music. He lets the varied tone colours shape
the phrases, and adds no more rubato than the score demands. This has the
paradoxical effect of making the music sound all the more intimate and immediate:
Osborne takes himself out of the equation, letting the audience commune
directly with the composer. Messiaen himself poses question after question,
with his irregular rhythms and unresolving harmonies, and rather than offering
his own answers, Osborne leaves the music open for his listeners to decide for
themselves. And when major chords and simple cadences appear from within the otherwise
complex limited-transposition harmonies, Osborne never dwells on them,
suggesting that any resolution they offer is only transient, and that the big
questions still remain.

The
louder music makes exceptional demands on the performer’s virtuosity. Osborne
has the technical facility to deal with everything the Messiaen throws at him.
The long crescendos are finely graded, and the climaxes have a volcanic
intensity. Sudden dynamic changes are expertly timed to give each new idea a
sense of inevitability: there was never any feeling here that either Messiaen
or Osborne was simply out to shock.

Osborne’s
unromantic reading is fully validated by the quiet movements. The composer’s
message is conveyed here through the continual repetition of the elegant ideas,
rather than through that elegance itself. These passages are presented with
clarity of texture, and with the repetitions suggesting gentle insistence
rather than pedantry. The approach works because Osborne also has a mastery of
the music’s form and progression, which given the sheer scale of this work is
perhaps the most impressive aspect of his reading. Messiaen often writes long,
long crescendos and diminuendos over angular repeating figures. Osborne makes
the dynamic changes, but also keeps the colour and character of the music
constant throughout. And then when it returns, many movements later, it is exactly
the same as we last heard it.

The
heart of the performance was the penultimate movement, “I sleep but my heart
keeps watch”. We hear a short chordal motif, repeated incessantly and
interpolated by short scurrying figures at the top of the keyboard, and a
tolling bass note at the bottom. An absolute silence separates each of these
elements, not as a rhetorical gesture of phrasing, more as an ontological chasm
between the unrelated sonic worlds. And the audience maintained that silence
too, still held in rapt attention after around two hours of continuous
listening. The last movement, “Gaze of the Church of Love”, is similarly diffuse,
but much more intense. Here the main middle register idea is an obsessively
repeating chord, while the contrasting idea in the upper register has now
become bells. Osborne again maintained the high level of concentration, making
each chord and chime a significant and poignant event. After the final
flourish, a brief downward dive towards an earthy, deadened bass note, Osborne
stood to receive the applause. He seemed shattered, hardly able to stand from
the emotional exhaustion of the previous two and a quarter hours. Everybody in
the audience knew exactly how he felt.

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Gavin Dixon is a writer, journalist, editor and blogger specialising in classical music. He writes reviews and articles for a number of publications and websites. Gavin has a PhD on the Symphonies of Alfred Schnittke and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also a member of the editorial team behind the ‘Alfred Schnittke Collected Works’ edition, which recently began publication in St Petersburg. More information on Gavin’s writing activities can be found at his website: www.gavindixon.info